As their first PC release, Masquerada: Songs and Shadows is a great start for Witching Hour Studios. Overlooked at release, I stumbled onto this game by chance, and I don't regret it one bit! With a title involving the word "songs" you'd hope that the music in this game was up to scratch, and fear not! By far, the standout features lies in its sounds. It's music is spectacular and it's strongest asset, whilst it's voice acting is superb from its cast of experienced voice actors. Art wise, it is very good. I'm not an art person, so I'm not the best to judge in that aspect, but it was...uh "very good?", as an isometric rpg, the camera is set, so it can help emphasis the art, though there is room for improvemnts as not much "pop's out" or makes you go "woah". Plot wise- It's solid, with some twists and turns, nothing too predicatble, but the ending does leave itself quite open to a sequel, with a fair few unresolved plot threads. The writing sometimes jumps around a bit though and can at times be a little inconsistent. Gameplay wise, it is an isometric rpg with both action bars and real time pausing. It's fine. Nothing spectacular. It does it's job with you controlling your main character with the option to switch to 2 others. Each character has up to 4 skills to choose from with a special. These are selected from a skill tree (there are no levels in this game, and skill points are doled out at certain points in the story, but don't stress, 1/3 through the game this becomes fairly easy to completly readjust and change your skill tree). Lore wise? There is ALOT. If you enjoy reading Lore, you'll have a blast. Exploration is very limited, often you cannot return to a previous area, which was be a bit annoying. Furthermore, there are still a few minor bugs in the game, but nothing gamebreaking, just a bit irritating. Overall, this is a very good first attempt at a PC games by Witching Hour and I look forward to the sequel
